This page contains a brief history about the development of
aviation checklists used in aircraft today.

October 30, 1935Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio

On October 30, 1935, at Wright air Field in Dayton , Ohio ,
the U.S. Army Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane manufacturers
vying to build its next-generation long-range bomber. It wasn't supposed to
be much of a competition. In early evaluations, the Boeing Corporation's
gleaming aluminum-alloy Model 299 had trounced the designs of Martin and
Douglas. Boeing's plane could carry five times as many bombs as the Army
had requested; it could fly faster than previous bombers, and almost twice
as far.

A Seattle newspaperman who had glimpsed the plane called it
the "flying fortress," and the name stuck. The flight "competition,"
according to the military historian Phillip Meilinger, was regarded as a
mere formality. The Army planned to order at least sixty-five of the
aircraft.

A small crowd
of Army brass and manufacturing executives watched as the Model 299 test
plane taxied onto the runway. It was sleek and impressive, with a
hundred-and-three-foot wingspan and four engines jutting out from the wings,
rather than the usual two. The plane roared down the tarmac, lifted off
smoothly and climbed sharply to three hundred feet. Then it stalled, turned
on one wing and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew members
died, including the pilot, Major Ployer P. Hill (thus Hill AFB , Ogden ,
UT).

An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone
wrong. The crash had been due to "pilot error," the report said.
Substantially more complex than previous aircraft, the new plane required
the pilot to attend to the four engines, a retractable landing gear, new
wing flaps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control at
different airspeeds, and constant-speed propellers whose pitch had to be
regulated with hydraulic controls, among other features.

While doing all this, Hill had forgotten to release a new
locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls.

The Boeing model was deemed, as a newspaper put it, "too much
airplane for one man to fly. The Army Air Corps declared Douglas 's smaller
design the winner. Boeing nearly went bankrupt.

Still, the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test
planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable.
So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.

They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more
training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise
than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps' Chief of Flight
Testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they
created a pilot's checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight,
landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had
advanced.

In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the
air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a
checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a
driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too
complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.

With the
checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 18
million miles without one accident. The Army ultimately ordered almost
thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the B-17. And, because
flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army gained a decisive air
advantage in the Second World War which enabled its devastating bombing
campaign across Nazi Germany.

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